Floppi’s Relic Run: Tools and short Post-Mortem

A little while ago, I entered the 36th Ludum Dare game jam, and ended up creating my first ever game with the Godot Engine: Floppi’s Relic Run. Check the LD link there for the download. This post is a bit of a post-mortem on the jam project, but also to spotlight the tools that made this remotely possible.

To quote, well, myself:

Synopsis: You’re flung into some alternate space/time plane presumably far in the future, and an entity there says that they can send you home after clearing a certain number of relic gates. They can only be opened by collecting ancient relics. (Stone wheels, vaccuum tubes, and arrow heads were all I managed to add in time.) The world itself is not dangerous, despite my intentions to add more obstacles, but there’s a catch. Your time in each sector is limited because you’ve kind of been turned into a floppy diskette and are operating on borrowed power.

The game play mechanics are sparse in large part due to the fact I learned how to use Godot during the jam. Yeah, yeah, I know. Don’t do that. Lesson learned, the hard way. Like all the lessons I learn. Another piece of it is that I spent a long time on art and audio assets. I wanted the atmosphere to be polished. As far as that goes, I’m pleased with how that went.

I cannot compose music or engineer sounds, and I was in the compo. I couldn’t use premade assets and only had 48 hours to produce a game. As such, I ended up using generators. I used Bfxr for the sound effects, which is great when you need simple sound effects and you needed them yesterday. The music track, “Wandering Bitfield,” was composed with cgMusic and synthFont using the GMR Basico v1.1 sound font.

It was originally a dance composition, but I tweaked instrumentation and tempo until I had something I felt was good enough to use. I really like GMR. Based on what I could glean from the auto-translation, GMR Basico 1.1 is donationware and I, since it helped me so much, felt compelled to contribute. I intend to use it for later stand-alone music projects.

The art was largely created in GIMP and Krita. Whichever I used was largely dependent on how technical I was being. For instance, if I wanted exact straight lines at exact sizes I’d use GIMP, but for freehand drawing, I used Krita. In fact, Floppi, the the main character, was drawn entirely in Krita with different layers for each part of the sprite so they could be animated separately.

Now I’d like to write a bit about Godot itself, but I’ll leave that for another post. There’s a lot to write of my first project with it.